Help me Rondeau, Help Help me Rondeau

In Today's Roundabout Issue

Rondeau

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Circles
Word
Random Joke
Finish with a Song

A Rondeau is a short poem consisting of fifteen lines that have two rhymes throughout. The first few words or phrase from the first line are repeated twice in the poem as a refrain.

Help me Rondeau, Help Help me Rondeau

  

The sofa calls me to my rest

Like mewling babe embraced by breast

Swallowed up incased in leather

Enveloped against the weather

I have a home for that I’m blessed

It is MY sofa I’m no guest

Place for me somewhere to tether

My safety sofa.

I sink myself into headrest

Hide within when I am stressed

Place to get myself together

Stuffed with bird death their own feathers

I leave a dent, am I depressed

My safety sofa.

Circles

The simplicity of the circle — a set of points on a plane that are all the same distance from another point called the centre – has endlessly fascinated humans. Circles (from the Greek kirkos, meaning ring, from the ancient root ker, meaning “to turn”) are symbols of infinity – a line that never ends.

The Greek philosopher Empedocles (493-433BC) devised a highly eccentric personal cosmology whose god was a circle “of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere”.

Circles are also efficient: they cover the maximum possible area for a given perimeter, or have the minimum possible perimeter for a given area. They are useful, too: a filled-in circle is a disc and gave us the wheel, perhaps the most famous of all inventions.

Divination circles

Gyromancy is a form of divination in which a person walks in circles until they fall over through dizziness. The position one falls in is then used to interpret the outcome of future events.

Walking in circles

In situations where there are no navigational clues – such as a snowstorm or thick fog – humans always end up going around in circles.

Research carried out in 2009 by the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen had volunteers set down in a particularly empty bit of the Sahara or the dense, flat Bienwald Forest in south-west Germany and tracked them using GPS. When the sun or moon was out, they were perfectly capable of walking in a straight line. When it wasn’t, they started to walk in circles, crossing their own path several times: the average diameter of the circle they walked was only 66ft (20m). It suggested that we have no instinctive sense of direction.

Ant circles

If a group of army ants gets separated from the main foraging party, they can lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another. They form a continuously rotating circle and keep going until they die of exhaustion.

Stone circles

The most famous henge – an oval area enclosed by a bank and an internal ditch – is Avebury, in Wiltshire. The nearby ancient stone circle of Stonehenge isn’t, strictly speaking, a henge because its ditch runs outside its bank.

The word henge was given its precise modern meaning by Thomas Kendrick, Keeper of British Antiquities at the British Museum, in 1932. For centuries, any stone circle or ritual site was called a henge in imitation of Stonehenge. The word had long since lost its meaning in Old English, which was “hanging place” (either in the sense of “gallows” or “precipice”).

Kendrick used it to mark out a particular style of circular monument which occurred all over the British Isles but not in the rest of Europe. But, by defining it so precisely, he excluded Stonehenge itself.

Star circles

Zodiac comes from the Greek kyklos (circle) and zoon (animal), and so means “circle of animals”.

The identification of the constellations with animals and mythical figures was first recorded in the Sumerian civilisation of Mesopotamia, around 3,000BC, from where it spread to Egyptian and Greek cultures.

Crop circles

Mathew Williams, of Devizes in Wiltshire, is the only person to have been arrested for creating crop circles; in 2000 he was fined £100 after putting his work on the internet.

Circle of learning

The word encyclopedia literally means a “circle of learning” and was originally used to indicate a well-rounded education. It was not used as a title for books of general knowledge until the 17th century.

VORFÜHREFFEKT (German) - "demonstration effect", when something doesn't work until you go to show someone the problem - and it suddenly works again.

Instead of ‘British Summer Time’ and ‘Greenwich Mean Time’ why not just call it ‘Oven Clock Correct Time’ and Oven Clock One Hour Out Time’

FINISH WITH A SONG

This is The Circle of Life - Elton John